The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [76]
“There’s nothing wrong with my heart,” Annie insisted to her friend.
“Really? Seems to me it hurts.”
“My neck hurts, that’s all. Pinched nerve.”
“Right.”
Now Annie moved her neck side to side, hearing the crunch and crackle. At Annapolis she’d had to wear a brace late in her senior year, so painful was the pinch, or alternatively compressed disk, or myofascial trigger points, or displaced vertebrae—the neck specialists all had different diagnoses. Clark thought Annie’s problem went all the way back to the motorbike accident. Georgette thought it was psychosomatic.
In the King, flying through the black night, Annie rolled her neck, humming, “Don’t tell me the lights are shining, any place but there.” She rubbed at the knot in her shoulder’s muscle. The instrument panel was so familiar she knew right where to tap it when a light blinked. The red engine-overheat warning light flashed on, then off. Or had it? Was she losing thrust? No, indicators looked fine. “…Lights are shining, any place but there.”
***
Back in Emerald, Clark returned home from the hospital after removing the bullet from his young patient’s leg and assuring the parents that the wound was superficial.
In the kitchen he ate a little more birthday cake. Sam found him there. “You’re going to get diabetes,” she prophesized, watching Clark cut off a second piece of the cake.
“That’s your only hope for justice, isn’t it?” His weakness for late-night sweets never put weight on him. “Did Annie call?”
“Not yet.” Sam said she had some news: the beads on Annie’s pink childhood cap were worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. She couldn’t wait to tell her.
“That’s ridiculous.” Clark carried the baseball cap into the morning room and under a lamp studied the beads of colored glass. He said the odds were a million to one that they were real gems.
“Well, they are,” Sam said, leaning over his shoulder. “And Annie will be glad Jack wanted her to have something valuable from him, some kind of inheritance.” Her brow tightened. “Especially if he’s dying.”
Clark looked closely at the beads. “If these beads are real, Jack’s getting her mixed up in something criminal.”
“It won’t be the first time,” admitted Sam.
“And dangerous. Don’t even bring this up to her.”
She sighed. “I care about one thing. Is that terrible? Her happiness. Let them settle this before he goes. All I want is Annie to be happy and get married and have children and bring them here for me to play with.”
“That’s more than one thing.”
“No it’s not.” She surfed cable movie channels for a late-night classic, settling on Giant.
They watched for a while. Clark broke off a taste of the cake for Teddy, who took it back across the hall to her pagoda.
Sam mused, “You remind me of Jordy Benedict. How Jordy rejects Rock Hudson’s macho ranch business and becomes a doctor and marries a Mexican nurse.”
Clark slowly scraped icing from his cake. “Except my father was no Rock Hudson and he was in the not-so-macho landscape nursery business.”
“That’s what Rock Hudson did in All that Heaven Allows. Maybe your dad was secretly gay.”
“As far as I know,” Clark said, “my father was not secretly anything. When we cleaned out his drawers and closets after he died, there wasn’t a secret in them. Unless you count a box of gold-plated golf tees that had never been used. It was heartbreaking how unsecret he was. And for another thing, I did not marry a Mexican nurse; Ileanna as you know was a radiologist from Argentina.” He grabbed the remote, switched it to the Southeastern Doppler “Storm Alert” on the Weather Channel.
For a while, they listened to alarmist predictions for the St. Louis area.
“We should have gone with Annie.” Clark ambled to the door. “We could have all died together.”
He returned with another piece of birthday cake to find Sam on the floor, briskly touching her toes. Finally she stopped, out of breath, and crawled back to the couch.